It’s not like the economy isn’t purposefully being wrecked by the current government administration or that they’re not trying to purge as many workers as possible to pump up unemployment and reduce the number of people who can patronize a small business and it’s not as if the government isn’t picking winners and losers and it’s not as if the tariffs don’t impact small business more than big business and so on and so forth.

But sure, believing stupid shit like you can fight and survive in a rigged economy where competitors a hundred times your size want to crush you economically and legally totally makes sense and isn’t moronic at all. /s

This post references this is [USA] in the title and even when it comes to Wall Street the entire economy is hinging on a small number of massive businesses with absurd valuations at the moment.

It happens anytime between a few seconds after the OS loads, to hours or days later.

That will tell you relatively quickly if it’s a hardware problem or a software problem.

I mean, potentially not that quickly if they have to wait days for it to happen. Good low-investment-of-personal-time-and-effort suggestion though.

the /var/log/ folder would be the best place to start.

1. When a random freeze occurs note the time. Try to be as accurate and close to the time it happened as you can, including day, hour, and minute.
         A. If possible, do this for multiple instances of this happening

2. Check various log files starting with syslog and look at the times noted above. Look for any relevant errors being thrown by the system at these times.

She says that if I can’t even have the courage to “go outside often and be a ‘normal’ human being”, I wouldn’t be able to handle/manage the assets/investments they have. (Small bussiness, won’t go into detail about it)

Your mother is a giant fucking asshole. Neither of those things have anything to do with one another. Nerds have created whole businesses online while barely seeing the light of day and have become millionaires and billionaires from it while barely seeing the light of day.

Secondly, if she really think their “small business” is going to survive the purposeful collapse the wealthy are going to put us through, she’s not just an asshole, she’s also a certified fucking moron.

Agreed on that, it’s not the best solution, but for people who need access to computing and whose devices have aged out of other support, it’s pretty much the only option available.

I’m in the minority who thinks Linux isn’t for everyone and that people who approach computing from that standpoint should really stick with macOS or Windows. Linux gives you more freedom to be in control, but that freedom to be in control also demands more knowledge and involvement to be able to be in control. “With great power comes great responsibility” kind of thing.

For an analogy Windows is like being a passenger in a car with someone else driving, and Linux you’re in the drivers seat of the car. You simply are required to be aware and involved in driving more because you are in control, and that control requires knowledge. You don’t get to sit back and go “I don’t need to know what all this stuff does because I don’t want to.” Understanding how the pedals and steering wheel work is a requirement for driving, as is paying attention to what is going on around you on the road. As a passenger, you aren’t required to know or pay attention to as much because you’re not being given the freedom of control, you’re just along for the ride. Linux is giving you that freedom of control of being the driver, but you have to know a lot more to do it than you need to know just being a passenger (Windows).

I know everyone else thinks Linux is ready for the prime time and ready for regular users who don’t want to have to learn and just want something that works… but I personally don’t. Simply because Linux is a lot less guaranteed to “just work” than the other options.

It’s basic in the sense that Linux is always a work in progress and no matter how hard you try, you’re going to need it at some point.

When your system randomly turns on to a black screen and there is seemingly no way to log in, knowing how to switch to the command line and at bare minimum back up your settings and documents before you wipe and start over is pretty key. To be clear, I have been in that exact situation and even more confusing situations where the PC has basically become unusable but I was able to fix it via CLI.

Just imagine losing months or years of work because you don’t know that you can probably fix it all from command line and likely don’t even need to wipe your computer and start over if you can narrow down what is going wrong and remove it via the command line.

I dunno seems pretty important to me.

Graphics driver installation is pretty key on any system but AMD graphics systems.

For example if your parents want to watch any videos without them stuttering or being weird, whether Intel or Nvidia, they will need the non-free graphics drivers installed so it doesn’t run like shit.

To my knowledge nearly every AMD chipset already works out of the box on Linux.

At least a basic primer about finding your way around in Linux in command line, and where various configuration files live.

When shit goes wrong (and it likely will at some point) knowing how to dump to another tty and log in via the console and fix issues via command line is pretty key. This has saved my ass more times than I can count now.

Having trouble finding a CLI focused course, but this is a free course that covers a lot of basics:

https://training.linuxfoundation.org/training/introduction-to-linux/

I have been struggling with insomnia. Like right now for example. It is nearly 3am and I have been trying to sleep since before 11pm.

I really struggle when I can’t get good sleep.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1436186

This paper used to be available on Rufus Pollock’s own website but today returns a 404.

https://rufuspollock.com/papers/optimal_copyright_term.pdf

In 2009 Pollock did the math and concluded that optimal copyright length for artists to recoup investment in developing the art balanced with making art available in the public domain was about 16 years.

This paper’s math isn’t easy to grok if you’re not an economist, but it’s a good resource that balances the need for copyright with the need for public domain knowledge and art.

Exactly. Trump is literally the person people like me used to warn about handing these kind of powers off to that everyone said “that won’t happen here!” Living through 9/11, the Bush years and then living through this makes me feel like I’m taking fucking crazy pills.

Good catch on this old documentation. People really need to understand how long the police state has been slowly being built up. In 2007, George W. Bush was still president.

2007 was the year that the New York Times finally presented their story about warrantless wiretapping by the NSA of US citizens that they had sat on for the Bush administration for over a year.

While so much of this goes back to things like Reagan (Executive Order 12333) and Nixon (“when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal”), people really need to understand how much of this really ramped up due to the War on Terror and the (now defunct) PATRIOT Act during the Bush II years.

I wouldn’t consider any Linux phone ecosystem developed enough to consider a “daily driver” phone yet. If you need a phone to be functional at pretty much all times as a phone, but you don’t want to give into smartphones, I honestly would suggest a VOIP landline (that you potentially roll out and serve yourself, depending on your level of technical ability and available resources).

Wow, big dawg. Yawn. Keep going, it’s my day off. Let’s hear what other pathetic insults you think will make me feel bad about myself while instead making you look like a loser.

You care enough to keep commenting back. Someone who didn’t care would have given up this chain a while ago. Keep lying to yourself, kid. (Also, you just admitted you cared enough to go look and notice it’s one person, do you even listen to yourself?)

Right, the person referencing fucking batgirl as if superhero comics are some super secret underground cool shit isn’t the normie pretending to be cool (pro-tip: superhero comics have always been normie trash). You sure have a lot of free time to try to get in the last word for someone who is out there doing big things with their life. I at least have the excuse that I know I’m a regular lame ass not trying pretending to be anything else.

Yes, and like batgirl, your little stories about yourself are just as fictional.

Anyone with actual access like you’re claiming wouldn’t be stupid enough to be telling random internet yahoos about it to prove internet cred on an unencrypted pseudo-anonymous forum. Whistleblowers don’t risk it all to prove something to a guy named “Snot Flickerman.”

But you do you, at least you live up the the lunatic part of your username.

This has gone from silly to straight delusional.